The sand never forgot. That’s what they said in the towns that clung to the wind-shaved cliffs and salt-bitten outposts of the Ishkala Dunes. It remembered footsteps, names, and bargains no man should have made. It remembered prayers that were whispered too loud and relics that were never meant to be touched. And sometimes, the sand whispered back.
But Harun didn’t care about old warnings. Not anymore.
He wasn’t a relic hunter or a seeker of glory. He was a man with cracked hands, a rotting waterskin, and debts that reached back generations. His skin was the color of wind-scoured clay, burnt at the edges, his beard streaked with dust. A threadbare keffiyeh shielded his face from the worst of the sun, and his robe was patched with the hand-stitching of someone who didn’t expect to be seen. Forgotten places weren’t mysteries to Harun. They were income. He walked the dunes not because he was brave—but because the gods, if they still watched, didn’t watch this far south.
He hadn’t said his mother’s name in years. Not since her lantern had gone dim the first time. Not since hope had become something he sold for food.
The lantern swung from his hip, scuffed brass with a glass eye. It had belonged to his mother. She’d called it lucky, said its light would always find a path out of the dark. He still believed that — though lately, he wasn’t sure where it was leading.
He came upon the ruin at the edge of a salt basin, where even the wind held its breath. Jagged stone spires rose like broken teeth from the red dust, half-devoured by time and sandstorms. Faded murals clung to the outer walls, their pigment flaking like dried blood. The air there felt thinner, as if the ruin exhaled only when no one watched. Birds wheeled wide around it. Even the flies avoided the doorway. The entire structure slumped slightly to one side, as if exhausted by the centuries. It wasn’t marked on the old traders’ maps or the whisper-charts passed between caravan riders. That meant it hadn’t been picked clean. Yet.
The door—stone, circular, carved with half-eaten glyphs—creaked open with less resistance than expected. As it swung, a gust of air exhaled from within — not stale, but strangely sweet, like rotting fruit mixed with incense. Inside, the air was cool and wrong. It pressed against his skin, damp and expectant. Not musty. Not sacred. Just… still. As though something had paused, mid-breath, to listen.
He lit the lantern. The flame hissed once, then steadied.
Inside, the temple stretched longer than expected — a corridor of worn stone flanked by half-toppled columns etched with scenes of men bowing before something vast and formless. Grim murals covered the walls, depicting not triumph but surrender — eyes torn from faces, mouths stitched shut, figures kneeling beneath descending stars. The air was thick with silence, broken only by the distant clinking of chains, though no wind stirred and no metal could be seen.
He stepped carefully — the floor was uneven, and more than once he noticed thin cracks webbing from beneath suspicious tiles. At one point, his lantern caught a flicker of movement near the base of a pillar. He paused. A whisper coiled around him like smoke. Instinct screamed, and he shifted his weight just in time. A hidden plate depressed where he’d almost stepped, releasing a whisper of gas from the mouth of a carved jackal. The air shimmered briefly, then settled. Harun kept moving, slower now.
Along the corridor’s edge, a side chamber had collapsed, but what remained gleamed faintly. A pile of ancient offerings—coinage worn faceless, shattered idols, and delicate chains of silver and turquoise—lay untouched. But none of it called to him. It was the shrine ahead that pulled at his bones.
At the end of the hall, the room narrowed into a shrine. A cracked dais sat beneath a shaft of light that dripped like thin blood through a jagged hole above. On the altar, wrapped in faded red cloth, lay a single object: a jawbone.
He stared at it.
The bone was clean. Too clean. Not just preserved—pristine. Symbols were carved into its curve. Not etched. Not painted. Grown.
He didn’t touch it.
A tremor moved through him—not from the ground, but from within. Like something ancient had seen him, then looked away.
Harun took the jawbone. The moment his fingers closed around it, something inside his chest felt… lighter. As if a thought that had never belonged to him was suddenly gone. Or waiting to return.
The cloth smelled of cinnamon and something wet. The moment it touched his satchel, the lantern flickered. For the first time in years, Harun muttered a prayer. Not to a god. To himself.
That night, he camped far from the ruin, too shaken to go further. He didn’t sleep. The stars blinked in patterns he couldn’t recognize. The wind forgot to blow. His mouth whispered a name he didn’t know, over and over, until he bit his tongue to stop it.
In the morning, the jawbone was gone. But his satchel was heavier.
Before he could decide what to do next, a shape appeared on the horizon — another scavenger, face covered in red cloth, eyes narrow and wild. The man greeted him like an old rival, not a stranger.
“Harun,” he said, voice taut. “You’re always the last one out and the first to stir up what should stay buried.”
Harun squinted, recognizing the voice. “Jarek. Didn’t think you still scraped the dunes. Thought you’d found safer trades.”
“Safer than chasing whispers in dead temples? Always,” Jarek said, stepping closer. “I saw the ruin. Saw your tracks. Whatever you took — it’s cursed. Leave it.”
Harun’s fingers twitched near his satchel. “I don’t even know what it is.”
“That’s the worst part,” Jarek muttered. “It doesn’t matter. These things don’t care what you know. Only that you look. That you listen.”
The cloth in Harun’s satchel moved, a slow shift like breath.
“I said leave it,” Jarek snapped. “I’ve walked too long to watch another fool dig his own grave. Not again.”
Harun hesitated. He looked down, not at Jarek, but at the satchel. The weight of it. The thing inside breathing softly like a sleeping child. He met Jarek’s eyes and for a moment, he felt something close to shame.
“You might be right,” he said quietly. “Maybe I should leave it.”
Jarek relaxed, just a fraction.
Then Harun’s hand moved on its own.
The jawbone was in his grip, sudden and sure, cold as stone. He opened his mouth to shout — or maybe to beg — but no words came. His arm arced forward like it belonged to someone else.
He didn’t stab — the bone lunged.
There was no blood. Just a gasp, and Jarek’s shadow split in two.
Harun stood there, arm still outstretched, the jawbone slick and silent in his grip. He stared at Jarek’s fallen body — not wounded, just… emptied. The desert had taken something, and it had used Harun’s hand to do it.
He dropped the bone, but it clung to his fingers like frost.
What had he done?
His mind scrambled for denial, for logic — maybe it was a trick, maybe Jarek was cursed, maybe he hadn’t meant to — but the truth was heavier than the satchel.
He hadn’t chosen this. But something had chosen him.
Harun sat for a long time after. When he opened the satchel again, the cloth had curled tighter, like it was breathing slower now.
He didn’t remember packing anything else. When he opened it, there was only the lantern, its flame still steady, but no wick inside. And beneath it — a sliver of cloth. Red. Damp. Breathing.
He closed it fast and didn’t open it again.
For three days, the dunes felt wrong. He walked in daylight, but the shadows moved with him. Shapes flickered at the corners of his sight — not creatures, not people. Just impressions. Echoes of something old. Something watching.
He dreamed of teeth. Not biting, not devouring. Just falling. Clattering down stone steps, swallowed by shadow. And in the dark, a voice that sounded like his mother’s asked, “Whose mouth did you steal them from?” Then, behind that voice, a second voice hummed — deep and vast — not a word, but the weight of hunger made sound. He tried to speak, but his tongue had been replaced by something rough and silent.Whose mouth did you steal them from?”
By the fourth day, he stopped walking. Just stood in the sun and listened. He swore he heard bells — not ringing, but unraveling, as if sound itself was being peeled away. Then came a whisper beneath the sand, not a word but a question with no language, no end. The sky turned the color of rust. A trail of ants circled his feet in a perfect spiral and disappeared into the dust. His fingers moved on their own, trying to count something that didn’t exist.
Then, his mother spoke.
“You’re always picking at bones, Harun,” she said, though she had been dead for years. “One day you’ll find one that bites back. And you’ll act surprised, like you didn’t dig it up yourself.”
He turned, but no one stood there. Only sand and shadow.
“You were born with no spine,” her voice said again, closer now, low and thick like oil. “Even the gods left you behind. You think scraping coins from dead stone will buy your soul back? You can’t barter with rot, boy. You are rot.”
High above, a flock of vultures began to circle. Five, maybe six. They glided silently in the hot air, spiraling lower. He squinted up—and they were gone. Not scattered. Not flown off. Just… gone. The sky above was empty.
Then came the laugh. It started as a crack in the silence, dry and distant, but grew thick and choking, like oil bubbling through a throat. It wasn’t his mother’s voice anymore. It was something that had borrowed her shape — and enjoyed it.
He ran.
He ran back toward the nearest outpost—six days east. His footsteps in the sand followed him and abruptly stopped. Others began to appear — not his. Bare, elongated, moving in circles around him when he wasn’t looking.
But something inside him didn’t run. Something sat very still.
And when he looked down at the lantern swinging at his side, he saw his mother’s face reflected in the glass. Smiling. But not her smile — something wider. Hungrier.
He never made it. A trader found his lantern burning on the road, no oil in its belly. The flame flickered blue.
They buried the lantern. But not too deep. It stayed lit for three days and nights, the flame cold and blue, flickering even under the sand as if refusing to be forgotten. Some claimed it cast shadows in the shape of bones — long, unfamiliar bones — that writhed and reached before vanishing at dawn.
The sand was shifting again. And it remembered Harun.
The jawbone? No one speaks of it. But in Ishkala, the wind has started whispering in a language no one claims to know.
And some swear they’ve seen footprints where no one walks.
Even at noon.
Even in the dunes.